Current Affairs

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !When we think of American power, we often think of missiles, guns, and tanks. But operating in the background is an incredibly powerful weapon whose use often goes unnoticed: the dollar. In her new book Paper Soldiers: How the Weaponization of the Dollar Changed the World Order, Bloomberg News correspondent Saleha Mohsin explains how the dollar's power actually works. What does it mean for the dollar to be the "global reserve currency" and how does this confer power? What do sanctions do and what determines whether they succeed or fail? How do changes in the value of currency alter the relative power of countries across the world? Mohsin joins us to answer a few basic questions that are crucial for understanding the world today.“ The seeds of its weaponization were sown in 1944 as World War II came to an end, began in earnest after September 11, 2001, and may have gone too far in 2022... If the currency falls from kingship, then the country won’t be the fi

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for the Washington Post. Her new essay collection, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess, draws together and expands on some of her best work. It covers subjects including Marie Kondo and minimalism, the films of David Cronenberg, the novels of Sally Rooney, and the new sexual puritanism. However varied the topics, a few important themes recur, including a rejection of utilitarian minimalism and an embrace of pleasure, and a view that fulfilling "basic needs" is not enough, because our "wants" matter too. The declutterers and the puritans strip away some of what is most essential to the good life. Becca joins today to talk about her arguments, including why she thinks Sally Rooney's egalitarian Marxism rings false.Declutterers’ books, it turns out, are every bit as insubstantial as their slender clients. All the staples are short and snappy: though they are padded with cute visualizations and prin

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !We know the left is, generally speaking, anti-war and anti-imperialist. But if a left-wing government ever took power in the U.S., what would its foreign policy look like? How would it deal with, say, human rights abusing governments? Would it shun them? Sanction them? Would a leftist government send weapons to the victims of aggression? What would a left policy on Ukraine look like, for instance?Van Jackson is a leading left foreign policy thinker. His new book Grand Strategies of the Left aims to think through the toughest questions about what it would actually mean to have a "progressive" foreign policy. Jackson notes that because the DC think tank world is dominated by hawkish "blob" types, a lot of the most thorough research and thinking on foreign policy is done by people whose values he rejects. In this conversation, we talk about how the existing establishment sees the world, and how we can look at it differently."In prioritizing what it sees as th

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Daniel Knowles is a reporter for The Economist (yes, that one). His book Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse argues that cars are a problem, and shows all the ways in which we could have more satisfying, sustainable, affordable lives with fewer cars. That's a tough sell in a car-loving country like the U.S.A., where we love our giant-ass trucks and our drive-thru daiquiri stands. Daniel is British: who is he to tell us we have to trade in our pedestrian-mashing SUVs for Chairman Mao-style bicycles?Today, Daniel joins to make the sell for walkable communities, showing us all the ways cars cause problems, why the situation we're in wasn't inevitable, and how we can change our deadly, inefficient, climate-killing ways and have transit that better serves human needs.“There is simply no good reason that the sustainable option—living in a decent-size apartment or rowhouse, in a neighborhood where you can walk, cycle, and use public transport to get around—ough

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Ben Burgis is a philosopher and occasional contributor to Current Affairs, who runs the Philosophy for the People Substack and hosts Give Them An Argument. Today, Ben joins to respond to common arguments made to justify the policies of Israel and the United States in Gaza. "Israel has a right to defend itself," "Palestinian violence is the root cause of the problem," and other talking points are put to Ben, who gives logically precise but passionate defenses of the Palestinian people's rights and dignity. Ben offers a crash course in how to effectively argue the case against the war on Palestine.  

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !“While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” ―Eugene V. Debs"Are you willing to fight for someone you don't know as much as you're willing to fight for yourself?" —Bernie SandersPolitical philosophy is full of talk about liberty and justice. But in Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea, Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor argue that another concept is just as crucial when we consider how society ought to be ordered and what we owe one another: solidarity. A solidaristic ethic means seeing other people's fates as intertwined with your own, and being committed to fighting for the interests of those whose problems you do not necessarily share. It has underpinned the socialist project from Eugene Debs to Bernie Sanders, and as Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor show in the book, it has deep historical roots. They trace the origins of the idea of s

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Jessica L. Burbank is a broadcaster and commentator who appears on The Hill's Rising, co-hosts the Funny Money podcast, and now hosts her own online news program called Weeklyish News. Jessica is also big on TikTok, where she produces remarkable short videos communicating left political and economic ideas, such as this one on the power relationship between workers and bosses or this one on Elon Musk. Today Jessica joins to discuss how she thinks about the project of communicating ideas accessibly, using wit and operating within the limits of 21st century attention spans. 

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !John Washington is a journalist with Arizona Luminaria, whose new book The Case for Open Borders rebuts common anti-immigrant argument and shows that a world in which people can freely move from one territory to another will not create a "crisis" but will in fact benefit everyone. Today he joins to discuss the bipartisan rhetoric about immigration being a disaster or crisis, and to help us understand why militarized borders cause a lot more harm than they prevent. Washington argues that fears of immigration are overblown and instead of moving toward greater "border security" we should be reforming the border to relax admissions. The photo above is of the Arizona-Mexico border circa 1899, when crossing from one country into another was as simple as crossing the street. See also the Current Affairs article "We Need To Make the Moral Case for Immigration." "The case for open borders must ultimately be a positive one, explaining why the freedom to move—coupled

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Grace Blakeley is one of the left's leading economic thinkers. In her new book, Vulture Capitalism, Blakeley explains how capitalism really works and gives a crucial primer on the modern economy. She joins today to explain why conceiving of "free markets" and "government planning" as opposites is highly misleading, because our neoliberal "market-based" economy involves many deep ties between the state and corporations. Instead of thinking of "capitalism" and "socialism" as a spectrum that runs from markets to government, Blakeley says we should focus our analysis on who owns and controls production, and who gets the benefits."The choice isn’t “free markets” or “planning.” Planning and markets exist alongside each other in capitalist societies—indeed, in any society. The choice is whether the planning that inevitably does take place in any complex social system is democratic or oligarchic. Do we allow a few institutions to make decisions that affect everyon

Get new episode early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Lewis Bollard directs the farm animal welfare program at Open Philanthropy, and writes the organization's farm animal welfare research newsletter. In the newsletter, Bollard has argued that animal welfare is a crucial moral issue and tried to explain the dissonance between people's stated compassion for animals and their willingness to tolerate animals' mass suffering in factory farms. Bollard explains the massive amount of work it will take to reduce or eliminate factory farming, and the setbacks including the challenges plant-based meats have had. He also shows, however, that there have been striking successes that should make the issue feel less hopeless and insurmountable, and actually major improvements to animal welfare are within reach. Today he joins to explain why the issue is a priority, why it's so challenging to mobilize people around, what has been accomplished so far, and what could be accomplished with more activism and political pressure. "W

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Journalist Josie Cox is the author of the new book Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality, a history of the 20th century women's movement that documents the remarkable courage of the women who gave us suffrage, abortion rights, and greater equality across many dimensions of social and economic life. Today she joins to discuss how those gains were made, but also the failures (such as the story of the Equal Rights Amendment). She also talks about how many of the striking victories for women's equality are now under serious threat of rollback.   

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Zoë Schiffer is the author of the new book "Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter," which tells the full story of how the richest man in the world took over a major piece of the 21st century "public square." Schiffer does not take a nostalgic view of pre-Musk Twitter, showing that the company was in many ways poorly run and Twitter itself highly dysfunctional. But she shows how Musk's capricious, self-aggrandizing approach to running the platform have altered it. We discuss the role of Twitter in 21st century America, Musk's radicalization into anti-woke politics, and the harms that come from having someone with so much wealth be given so much power to shape our public discussions.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !The day Henry Kissinger died, Jacobin magazine released a book, which they had completed years before, called The Good Die Young: The Verdict on Henry Kissinger. In the book, edited by René Rojas, Bhaskar Sunkara, and Jonah Walters, a group of foreign policy experts trace Kissinger's career from continent to continent, showing the human consequences of his Machiavellian choices. But The Good Die Young doesn't just treat Kissinger as a uniquely malevolent figure, and shows how he fits into broader schemes of U.S. global dominance after the Second World War. Co-editor Jonah Walters joins us today to give a rundown of Kissinger's career, to explain what makes him an important figure, and to assess what his legacy will be."It’s small wonder that the political establishment regarded Kissinger as an asset and not an aberration. He embodied what the two ruling parties share in common: a commitment to maintaining capitalism, and the resolve to ensure favorable con

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Hamilton Nolan is a leading labor journalist whose new book The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor is both a study of recent labor organizing in our time and a strong case for why unions are vital to the health of the country. Hamilton goes around the country, from South Carolina to Las Vegas to New Orleans, showcasing the achievements of organized labor and revealing what is possible when working people come together to wield their "hammer" through collective action. He is highly critical of some of the country's largest labor unions for "fortress unionism" (protecting the gains of their existing members without organizing new ones). In today's conversation, he explains why union density has remained stubbornly low in the United States, and lays out a vision for what could happen once working people become conscious of the power that they can wield together. 

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Marxist philosophers do not often write bestsellers, but as the New York Times wrote in a profile of today's guest, Kohei Saito's work has unexpectedly taken Japan by storm:"When Kohei Saito decided to write about “degrowth communism,” his editor was understandably skeptical. Communism is unpopular in Japan. Economic growth is gospel. So a book arguing that Japan should view its current condition of population decline and economic stagnation not as a crisis, but as an opportunity for Marxist reinvention, sounded like a tough sell. But sell it has. Since its release in 2020, Mr. Saito’s book “Capital in the Anthropocene” has sold more than 500,000 copies, exceeding his wildest imaginings. Mr. Saito, a philosophy professor at the University of Tokyo, appears regularly in Japanese media to discuss his ideas. ... Mr. Saito has tapped into what he describes as a growing disillusionment in Japan with capitalism’s ability to solve the problems people see around t

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Originally aired January 29, 2024There is an ongoing case in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) brought by South Africa against Israel, which alleges that Israel's conduct in Gaza constitutes a serious breach of the Genocide Convention. The Court recently issued a preliminary ruling allowing the case to go forward and requiring Israel to comply with its obligations under the Genocide Convention. Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept joins us today to explain the basics of the accusations being made against Israel, the Israeli government's response, and to give his evaluation of the evidence that South Africa has presented so far. Note that this interview was recorded before the court issued its preliminary ruling allowing the case to go further. Jeremy's analysis of the ruling can be found here. An analysis of the case in Current Affairs is available here.During its presentation before the court, Israel made no arguments to defend its conduct in Gaza that

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Ingrid Robeyns is a professor at Utrecht University, where she specializes in political philosophy and ethics. She's the author of Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth, a new book which argues for rational limits on how much money a single person can amass. Today on the podcast, Dr. Robeyns joins to explain how the super-rich keep everyone else poor, how large concentrations of wealth damage democracy and the environment, and how "limitarian" public policies can become a reality. "There are many different reasons why you might endorse a limitarian worldview. There is the principled objection against inequality. Or there’s the fact that so much excess wealth is tainted. Society’s richest have appropriated an unfairly large part of the economic gains of the past century, and they need to redistribute that surplus. Or you might support limitarianism because it would do a huge amount to address existing power imbalances and protect political equality

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Ryan Grim is the Intercept's D.C. bureau chief and the author of The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution. Ryan's book chronicles the rise of the "Squad" in Congress, but also chronicles the entire recent history of left politics in the United States including the Bernie Sanders campaigns and the legislative fights under Biden. The book is a fascinating insider account of how power really works. The Squad were all elected as insurgent Democrats challenging the party establishment. But once inside the House, they encountered a familiar dilemma: do you go to war against the party leaders, and alienate them, or do you try to work with them? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez herself, Grim reports, had conflicting impulses, but ultimately axed staff members who pushed for a more confrontational approach. Did the more conciliatory path gain the hoped-for results? Grim joins today to discuss. Who is the "Squad"? Are they just a media creation or do they act a

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Ed Broadbent was perhaps the best-known democratic socialist in Canada. He served for 14 years as the head of the country's New Democratic Party, after beginning his career as a political theorist. Broadbent's new book Seeking Social Democracy: Seven Decades in the Fight for Equality (written in collaboration with, among others, Current Affairs contributor Luke Savage) is a tour through the last half century of Canadian politics, and for Americans it offers a fascinating window into what it looks like when a democratic socialist politician gets close enough to power to have to make serious policy decisions. Broadbent joins us today to introduce listeners to the basics of the Canadian political system and talk about what he learned over the course of his career, where he earned the respect of a wide swath of Canadians, to the point where he has been called "Canada's most iconic social democrat" and "the best prime minister we never had." We discuss how Cana

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Mark Chiusano of Newsday knows George Santos better than anyone else, having covered Santos’ political career from its start to its recent ignominious end. His new book The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos documents the full rise and fall of our country’s most infamous lying legislator. Today on the podcast, Chiusano joins us to explain how it came to be that, in a country as committed to honesty and fairness as the United States, someone who lies shamelessly could make it into a position of power. The lessons of the Santos saga may tell us as much about who we are as a nation as they do about the House of Representatives’ most infamous grifter.Transcript available here:  https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/12/the-journalist-who-most-understands-george-santos-explains-how-he-made-it-to-congress